How to fix "Zotero Integration Error" in Ubuntu

So today, on my brand new Ubuntu 10.04 installation, I wanted to install the excellent Zotero extension for Firefox which installed fine. But it was the Zotero Openoffice Integration Extension which gave me trouble.

I installed the Zotero Openoffice Integration extension without trouble but when I started up Openoffice Writer and clicked on one of the Zotero icons to test it out, I saw the following message pop up:

Zotero Integration Error

Firefox could not load the component required to communicate with your word processor. Please ensure that the appropriate Firefox extension is installed and try again.

That of course led to me feeling mildly disappointed since everything else with my new Ubuntu install has been working perfectly. Though I did end up finding the solution to the error.

After filtering through many posts and trying out many different proposed solutions from the Zotero forums and finding out that none of them actually worked for me, I came across a page of the official Zotero support which details how to solve this Component Loading Error on Ubuntu Linux.

The problem is explained as follows:

The Zotero plugin for Open Office requires the original Java by sun (sun-java6) to be installed and selected as the default plugin.¹

Since Ubuntu probably installs some hippie free version of Java by default, you need to install the Sun Java runtime. That's about all it took to get the Zotero Openoffice plugin running perfectly fine. There are a few more details you must follow though.

John, 25-06-10 14:10:

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This worked for me until I tried to use "bookmarks" (which is the recommended method to use Zotero if you need to collaborate with Microsoft Word users, which I do). Attempting to change bibliographic styles or refresh my citations completely chokes. My workaround for that is to remove the Ubuntu default OpenOffice installation and install the latest version directly from http://www.openoffice.org

This occurred using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit.

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